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Sunday, May 13, 2007

Another Great Radio Cliché

Peter Day presents the excellent In Business on Radio Four. Just caught tonight's which is about marketing to teenagers: lots of blasé voices claiming to have cracked the code of what today's young people want and hoping to sell their expertise to panic-stricken brands. Anyway, this programme had one of the signature clichés of all radio programmes that deal with youth - the panel. This will always consist of one girl, one boy and one person with an identifiably "ethnic" accent or name. This trio will always say the same things: grown-ups patronise us, we're not impressed by that kind of thing, we only respond to things that are really subtle etc etc. The recourse to the panel is rooted in the the mistaken belief that people in their teens are more homogenous than people in their forties. It will also have fallen foul of the fact that people in the media only know other people in the media and therefore one of the children will have an amusing first name and a parent who runs a major media company. This did both.

2 comments:

There is little hope for big business in reaching the youth, as even though most of the people who run it are blokes my age or older, they regularly offer me services etc that have me chewing the carpet: two recent examples.

My phone company wakes me (I’d left my mobile on) at 9am on sat morning with text offering “hot downloads on 2007’s hottest celebs!” I.e. out of date sanitised gossip and blurry jpgs of Jordon in a hand bra all at the bargain price of only 6 quid.OrThe major clothes shop that won’t me allow to buy some cords because “well it’s summer innit”If they can’t sell to “themselves” they haven’t a hope in hell of reaching the Youth.

Download proceeds apace... I'd really hit something like MegaUpload for the next one, David [he added with cordial presumption].This is disconcerting news re the usually admirable 'In Business' prog.You have to suspect 'da panel,like, innit' was the idea of some vile and beardless R4 producer, rather than the estimable old father Day - love his voice too. Tis a very curious misconception to which media / ad folk adhere that Today's Yoof have some refined, if subliminal sense of yer 'Postmodern Irony', when these media folk are merely ascribing their own [heavy parenthesis]'nicety of discrimination' to a worldview far less subtle. Surely we're talking about 'Thatcher's Grandchildren' here - and I imagine the simple horror of that term should precude any need for further explication, eh, dudes...?God, this download still hasn't finished yet...24.7MB and counting...What's likely to be on it then?A Wild Man Fischer single B side?Ah! Finished!I go.